... 1990 would have experienced some or all of the following: the demonization of Islam post 9/11; the turn of the century wave of mass immigration; 7/7 and the erosion of civil rights; greater politicisation of the justice system; the hollowing out of the traditional media; and then the Great Financial Crisis, endemic banking fraud and austerity. You couldn't have designed an environment more amenable to the conspiratorial memes of the far right: the UK's recent experience could easily be framed from the far right (as well as the far left) as the punishment of national communities by the agents of international finance. Tomorrow Belongs to Us also illustrates that, while the ...

... May 1987 report in the Washington Post, the CIA had an 'ultra-secret program to counterfeit millions of dollars in Afghan money' as part of the funding effort to support the Mujahideen who had been fighting against the Soviet occupiers since 1979. In an earlier article, the same reporters had stated that the covert funding program was riddled with fraud and that only about 30% of the Congressionally approved money was actually reaching the fighters.24 The very opening paragraph of the first chapter of veteran journalist Robert D. Kaplan's Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan has similar details regarding the CIA counterfeiting operation. It was, he claims, a plan to fund ...

... power in what North Americans call 'Old Europe'. Its last great moment was 1755 when the destruction of Lisbon by an earthquake precipitated a European financial panic.14 Since then, as the 2008 collapse of the casino economy amply showed, it has been sufficiently far from power to have become a very realistic place – a showcase for the fraud that drives that world economic system and for how a people accustomed to poverty and neglect by their rulers still manages to maintain a kind of quiet dignity and decency noticeably lacking in the Western hemisphere. The absurdity of that Publico report from Washington ought to be apparent in a country whose 11 million inhabitants – making it slightly larger than Mr ...

... to recover 3 billion som from the defendants for the benefit of the state, the Supreme Court said. ' 24 Yevgeny Gurevich, a Russian-born US citizen and adviser to AUB, was extradited from Italy to the USA on criminal charges brought by the New York District Attorney. Gurevich was jailed for five years after confessing to wire fraud related to insider trading. He handed to the US authorities over six million dollars which he admitted diverting in 2012 from Bakiyev's American bank accounts. In reporting his sentencing by the American court, Bloomberg quoted the judge who had described the theft as 'an egregious breach of trust' by someone displaying 'less than genuine remorse'.25 A ...

... .1 5 As one historian of the FBI has observed: 'by exaggerating the danger of organized vice, portraying it as a real menace to the American society, and by broadly interpreting the law, the Bureau in its formative years succeeded in expanding in size and jurisdiction from an obscure and subordinate government bureau, primarily engaged in examining bank frauds and anti-trust violations, to a growing and influential bureaucracy, engaged in sensational and headline-stealing cases'.16 With the Bureau's leadership, the Mann Act became a powerful legal weapon – and thus blackmail threat – against any unmarried couple who crossed state lines to have sex. In its early years, the Bureau also ...

... and Giancana now had the CIA 'over a barrel' and couldn't be touched by the FBI.75 SIDEBAR: The Jimmy Hoffa Connection W hy did Morgan and Pearson/Anderson falsely blame Robert Kennedy for the Castro assassination plots? One reason may be that it served the interests of Jimmy Hoffa, who was desperately fighting 1964 convictions for loan fraud and jury tampering engineered by his mortal enemy, the Attorney General. The leaker of the RFK assassination plot story, Morgan, was Hoffa's appeals attorney. We have seen that Morgan previously supplied ammunition to Senator Long's investigation of federal wiretapping to help Hoffa's case. Even before approaching Pearson, Morgan leaked portions of the 73 Lamar Waldron with ...

... account published there of this bizarre venture.9 Mellen shows that by mid-1963 LBJ and his backers were facing a major crisis: his network of graft and influence was coming unstuck. Criminal and political investigations were under way into Bobby Baker, Johnson's bagman, and Billie Sol Estes, one of his major financial backers, whose huge fraud of federal funds had been made possible in part by Johnson's influence. With the Kennedys keen to remove Johnson from the ticket for the 1964 election, these inquiries were not being discouraged by the White House. Attorney General Robert Kennedy had sent a large team of investigators down to Texas to investigate Estes' fraud. Not only was Johnson's ...

... The LBJ-dunnit thesis The late Billie Sol Estes is at the heart of the LBJ's-people- dunnit theory of the Kennedy assassination. That most of the Kennedy assassination researchers do not take this theory seriously is due, in large part, to their not taking Estes seriously, because he was a convicted fraudster. Precisely what his fraud was has been difficult to grasp until recently. But Amy Reading has researched it in detail and has published an intelligible account.2 7 Via Robert Caro's literary agent, I sent a third e-mail to him wondering why he had omitted Billie Sol Estes from his most recent volume on LBJ. For the third time I got ...

... .html> realised there were further ballots from their allocated batch still to be counted. The ballots were at all times on the count floor awaiting counting. The media present at the count were immediately briefed, they understood the situation, and did not think it significant to report. ' As shown by the current investigations into Tory expenses fraud during the 2015 election campaign,4 there are legitimate reasons to be sceptical about the results. The stories discussed above, however, are not legitimate reasons for scepticism. But no doubt, that van-full of votes will be trundling along the highways and byways of conspiratorial legend for years to come. Mind games of the rich ...